Chronicles of Spellborn

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A little PlanetSide, a little WoW, a lot of personality.

By Tom McNamara

With World of Warcraft heading steadily towards five million worldwide subscribers, it's become a tough act to follow. This year saw few MMOs of note, with everyone seemingly taking some extra time to polish their wares before putting them on display. If you don't have some big names behind your project, you're facing an uphill battle against the new king of the hill. Nevertheless, a more modest endeavor can't simply be shelved, and there are always people who aren't into WoW but might want to try something else. Something where combat is more interactive, or where you can have a cool appearance right from the beginning. After all, you're part of an online community, so you want to look good, right? City of Heroes understands this concept, and so does Chronicles of Spellborn, from the looks of things.

Being careful not to tread on the traditional fantasy territory already established so well by WoW, EverQuest and the like, CoS takes place in a very imaginative fantasy environment populated by planetoids whirling through the Deadspell Storm. The planetoids, or "shards," are the remnants of an empire controlled by eight demons, and you'll start out with access to a couple of those. But before you do that, you'll be designing your character. And interestingly, your outfit has no connection to your abilities.

In fact, you can dress yourself up like a stereotypical wizard but be a warrior, and vice-versa. You can be skinny or fat, short or tall (a nice change of pace from the ruggedly heroic, barrel-chested wizards and rogues of WoW). And presumably you'll be able to tweak your appearance after you've created your character. I for one like this setup, as many games of this type have a syndrome where you can tell at a glance how powerful a player is by how fancy their outfit is. While this is great for the powerful, it can be discouraging to the initiate. It also means you won't have to camp or otherwise compete for particular mobs so you can get that Sword of Uber +1. There's a lot less of the sometimes silly keeping up with the Joneses that can turn off folks who just want to jump in and have fun.

So combat is skill-based instead of gear-based. In the average gear-based MMO, emphasizing armor and weapons can put melee characters at a disadvantage. They have to account for damage absorption as well as damage output, whereas a caster can focus on just damage. The net effect is that the melee player becomes not particularly great in either category, while the caster gets to excel at offense and blast away mobs at his or her leisure (or restoration, if you're a healer). Instead, CoS moves more in the direction of Guild Wars, where the spells you choose and the way you use those spells is what makes the difference between success and death.

Khaeon has lots of experience with playing MMOs, and like Blizzard, it looks like they took a lot notes about things that work and things that annoy. They determined that having a neat appearance at the beginning makes the game more fun, as does being able to influence the game world. For example, certain achievements will earn you a temporary statue in-game that you can show off to friends and take pictures next to. Khaeon's mandate looks like "Make it fun, and make it fun for all player levels."